| In the beginning there was the foiling Moth. Then came the foiling 18ft skiff. Now a group of owners in Geneva, backed by the Syz & Co bank, are throwing a considerable amount of time and resource into the creation of a successful 9.8m (32ft) long catamaran foiler.
Patrick Firmenich, Jean Pfau, Jean Psarofaghis and Alex Schneiter, the group behind the new Syz & Co foiler cat are well known among the Lake Geneva racing community. They regularly campaign one of the radical Pharos 40 monohulls, as built by Jean Psarofaghis complete with canting keel, water ballast and trapezes (read more about these here) as well as the 28ft M2 catamaran Tilt, in which they have won the Bol d’Or Mirabaud’s M2 class no less than three times. Having achieved in pretty much every class the lake has to offer, they felt it was time to move on…
“I love any sailboat and on the lake with the monohull we did pretty much everything and we won the Bol d’Or three times within five years, so we wanted to move to somewhere else,” explained Alex Schneiter, the team’s skipper and helm, to us at the Bol d’Or Mirabaud start. “You have the one designs like the D35s and M2s, but the Bol d’Or is about new technology, it always has been about that and new innovation. So we thought ‘let’s start something’ and I think the logical step was, we like multihulls, and flying boats is clearly the way to go. I sail a Moth - we have 15 here, although I’m not very good! So we decided to do something different and started with the foiler, which I think is the future anyway.” ...more |
